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domingo, 4 de enero de 2015

The concentration of wealth: an article inspired by H.G.Wells' "The Time Machine"

What
would Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”),
George Orwell (“1984”) or H.G. Wells
(“The Time Machine”) say of today’s
world? Who makes the decisions which determine whether there is war or peace,
what happens to the environment, what food we eat, what clothes we wear, how we
think about persons of other cultures or ethical backgrounds, how we get
educated and how we view the world we live in?

Take
the case of the United States, self-proclaimed world leader and champion of
democracy and the free market. What kind of society is it whose top 1% owns
35.4% of private wealth, whose top 20% grabs nearly 90% of the wealth
(According to U.S. sociology prof. G. William Domhoff) and whose bottom 80%
barely has 11% of wealth? A society which proudly proclaims an end to the
financial crisis set off by top sector speculation and which celebrates an unemployment
rate of “only” 6% while, according to Gallop, 17.2% of the poor struggle to get
enough to eat…

What
kind of democracy is it that operates with but two political options, whose
political campaigns are organized essentially by powerful advertising entities,
which allows intelligence agencies to spy on practically everyone, whose agents
are authorized to use torture methods on suspected terrorists, which assumes for
itself the mandate of propagating its political-economic-cultural system around
the world, which classifies other countries as “friends” or “enemies,” which
carries on wars by decision of the chief executive without consulting the
Congress or the people, whose lobbies paid by giant corporations are a key
factor in the making or breaking of laws, whose …?

But
it is also a society which vibrates with its admittedly extraordinary
scientific and educational achievements, its diverse repertoire of film
production, of art, of music…whose mass media champion freedom of the press yet
their existence depends on the desires of the corporate interests that own
them, favoring by turn Democratic or Republican views, whose cities and towns
are clustered with churches of all denominations, whose inhabitants drive
enormous cars and live in houses that are several times the living spaces of
most of the world’s population, whose cities are crowded with ultra-modern
sky-scrapers, whose outsized and corporate owned farms use genetic engineering
to produce perfectly shaped and colored fruit and vegetables, whose private
hospitals charge exorbitant prices due in part to the use of extremely
expensive ultra-modern medical technology, which considers medicine a business
and not a service…

It
is also a country with a long brilliant line of writers and thinkers calling
for introspection—from Henry David
Thoreau who opposed the war against Mexico, refusing to pay taxes, to Howard Zinn, who has asserted that “it
is possible for organized citizens to resist and overcome what seem like
hopeless odds. The power of determined people armed with a moral cause is, I
believe, ‘the ultimate power,” and Noam
Chomsky, who noted in a recent interview (Dec. 8, 2013) that “In the US, for example, tens of
millions are unemployed, unknown millions have dropped out of the workforce in
despair, and incomes as well as conditions of life have largely stagnated or
declined. But the big banks, which were responsible for the latest crisis, are
bigger and richer than ever, corporate profits are breaking records, wealth
beyond the dreams of avarice is accumulating among those who count, labor is
severely weakened by union busting and "growing worker insecurity,"
to borrow the term Alan Greenspan used in explaining the grand success of the
economy he managed, when he was still "St. Alan," perhaps the
greatest economist since Adam Smith, before the collapse of the structure he
had administered, along with its intellectual foundations. So what is there to
complain about?”

Well.
In the disturbing H.G. Wells movie we see a future in which the underworld
rulers, the Morlocks, manage to reduce the inhabitants of the surface world,
the Eloi, to a state of utter non-think serfdom: they have become devoid of the
ability to recognize their subjection; with great docility they permit the
Morlocks to “breed” them for the exclusive purpose of feeding their master’s stomachs.
A fiction, true. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that reality and
fiction merge at one point, while at all periods in history voices and movements
appear to place a limit to power or to alter it—at least momentarily.